BNP Paribas Securities Services has acquired a minority stake in Fortia Financial Solutions. This deal helps Fortia, a start-up that provides compliance software to the financial services industry, cement the relationship it formed with the bank during the inaugural session of the fintech accelerator by L'Atelier BNP Paribas. Fortia's marquee product, the Innova software platform, comprises eight modules that use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to help manage, process, control and understand data. The solutions are tailored to help companies monitor risk, analyse data, manage AML and KYC requirements, and provide support for overall investment compliance. "Fortia's Innova solution tackles two very real challenges for financial services companies and institutional investors – growing regulatory requirements and mounting volumes of data – by applying new technologies in an intelligent and innovative way," says Jean Devambez, global head of product and client solutions, asset and fund services, at BNP Paribas Securities Services.

The supply of able ML designers has yet to catch up to this demand. A major reason for this is that ML is just plain tricky. This tutorial introduces the basics of Machine Learning theory, laying down the common themes and concepts, making it easy to follow the logic and get comfortable with the topic. So what exactly is "machine learning" anyway? ML is actually a lot of things. The field is quite vast and is expanding rapidly, being continually partitioned and sub-partitioned ad nauseam into different sub-specialties and types of machine learning.

Probabilistic modeling is a powerful approach for analyzing empirical information. We describe Edward, a library for probabilistic modeling. Edward's design reflects an iterative process pioneered by George Box: build a model of a phenomenon, make inferences about the model given data, and criticize the model's fit to the data. Edward supports a broad class of probabilistic models, efficient algorithms for inference, and many techniques for model criticism. The library builds on top of TensorFlow to support distributed training and hardware such as GPUs. Edward enables the development of complex probabilistic models and their algorithms at a massive scale.

Suppose the data consist of a set $S$ of points $x_j, 1 \leq j \leq J$, distributed in a bounded domain $D \subset R^N$, where $N$ and $J$ are large numbers. In this paper an algorithm is proposed for checking whether there exists a manifold $\mathbb{M}$ of low dimension near which many of the points of $S$ lie and finding such $\mathbb{M}$ if it exists. There are many dimension reduction algorithms, both linear and non-linear. Our algorithm is simple to implement and has some advantages compared with the known algorithms. If there is a manifold of low dimension near which most of the data points lie, the proposed algorithm will find it. Some numerical results are presented illustrating the algorithm and analyzing its performance compared to the classical PCA (principal component analysis) and Isomap.

Synthesizing images of the eye fundus is a challenging task that has been previously approached by formulating complex models of the anatomy of the eye. New images can then be generated by sampling a suitable parameter space. In this work, we propose a method that learns to synthesize eye fundus images directly from data. For that, we pair true eye fundus images with their respective vessel trees, by means of a vessel segmentation technique. These pairs are then used to learn a mapping from a binary vessel tree to a new retinal image. For this purpose, we use a recent image-to-image translation technique, based on the idea of adversarial learning. Experimental results show that the original and the generated images are visually different in terms of their global appearance, in spite of sharing the same vessel tree. Additionally, a quantitative quality analysis of the synthetic retinal images confirms that the produced images retain a high proportion of the true image set quality.

SAA T Laboratory, University of Abdelmalek Essadi, FPL, Larache Morocco Corresponding author: Abdelghafour Talibi,a.talibi@uhp.ac.ma Abstract The mixture models have become widely used in clustering, given its probabilistic framework in which its based, however, for modern databases that are characterized by their large size, these models behave disappointingly in setting out the model, making essential the selection of relevant variables for this type of clustering. After recalling the basics of clustering based on a model, this article will examine the variable selection methods for model-based clustering, as well as presenting opportunities for improvement of these methods. I INTRODUCTION Clustering aims to classify objects of a population in groups, where the objects in the same group are similar to each other, and the objects in different groups are dissimilar. Unlike the supervised classification where the number of groups is known in advance, at least for a sample, in the case of clustering, it is unknown how many groups and it remains to be estimated. In fact, many fields of research used clustering methods on the data, in order to obtain groups that allow understanding and interpreting the phenomenon studied.

This paper provides a quantitative method for estimating the risk associated with candidate transportation technology, before it is developed and deployed. The proposed solution extends previous methods that rely exclusively on low-fidelity human-in-the-loop experimental data, or high-fidelity traffic data, by adopting a multifidelity approach that leverages data from both low- and high-fidelity sources. The multifidelity method overcomes limitations inherent to existing approaches by allowing a model to be trained inexpensively, while still assuring that its predictions generalize to the real-world. This allows for candidate technologies to be evaluated at the stage of conception, and enables a mechanism for only the safest and most effective technology to be developed and released.

FOSS is an acronym for Free and Open Source Software. The FOSS 2013 survey primarily targets FOSS contributors and relevant anonymized dataset is publicly available under CC by SA license. In this study, the dataset is analyzed from a critical perspective using statistical and clustering techniques (especially multiple correspondence analysis) with a strong focus on women contributors towards discovering hidden trends and facts. Important inferences are drawn about development practices and other facets of the free software and OSS worlds.

In this paper, we study the stochastic combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) framework that allows a general nonlinear reward function, whose expected value may not depend only on the means of the input random variables but possibly on the entire distributions of these variables. Our framework enables a much larger class of reward functions such as the $\max()$ function and nonlinear utility functions. Existing techniques relying on accurate estimations of the means of random variables, such as the upper confidence bound (UCB) technique, do not work directly on these functions. We propose a new algorithm called stochastically dominant confidence bound (SDCB), which estimates the distributions of underlying random variables and their stochastically dominant confidence bounds. We prove that SDCB can achieve $O(\log{T})$ distribution-dependent regret and $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ distribution-independent regret, where $T$ is the time horizon. We apply our results to the $K$-MAX problem and expected utility maximization problems. In particular, for $K$-MAX, we provide the first polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for its offline problem, and give the first $\tilde{O}(\sqrt T)$ bound on the $(1-\epsilon)$-approximation regret of its online problem, for any $\epsilon>0$.

We develop a classification algorithm for estimating posterior distributions from positive-unlabeled data, that is robust to noise in the positive labels and effective for high-dimensional data. In recent years, several algorithms have been proposed to learn from positive-unlabeled data; however, many of these contributions remain theoretical, performing poorly on real high-dimensional data that is typically contaminated with noise. We build on this previous work to develop two practical classification algorithms that explicitly model the noise in the positive labels and utilize univariate transforms built on discriminative classifiers. We prove that these univariate transforms preserve the class prior, enabling estimation in the univariate space and avoiding kernel density estimation for high-dimensional data. The theoretical development and both parametric and nonparametric algorithms proposed here constitutes an important step towards wide-spread use of robust classification algorithms for positive-unlabeled data.